Simultaneity of Time and Weather in ‘Exotic’ Climates: The Experience of French Writers in Africa and the Americas

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore the ways in which certain climates (desert or jungle) perceived by western travellers to be ‘exotic’ affect their perceptions of time and weather (in French the word ‘temps’ covers the meaning of both English words). A particular effect repeatedly noted by nineteenth and twentieth-century French travel writers is that of simultaneity, either of weather patterns in certain mountain (vertical) or desert (horizontal) environments, and/or of a telescoping or dilation of linear temporal sequence. The disorientation experienced as a result of this, combined with a lack of narrative or historical reference in the spaces travelled through, leads typically to a feeling of lack of time or the illusion of entry into a mythical time. The implications of this phenomenon will be explored in the work of three French travel books: Eugène Fromentin's Un Eté dans le Sahara (1856); Henri Michaux's Ecuador (1928) and Jean Baudrillard's Amérique (1986).